


hope for nourishment (courage like love)

by speakmefair



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Needs To Use His Words, Captain America: The First Avenger, Gen, Introspection, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Self-Pity, Sometimes Napoleon Got It Right, This is Marvel So What's A Little Death Between Friends?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 21:38:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2084088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's got too many people telling him what to do.  He just wishes more than half of them weren't in his own head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hope for nourishment (courage like love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hitlikehammers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/gifts).



Sometimes Steve thinks that the serum has removed all those nice little warning voices that go along with being – well, being him without the serum, or before the serum, or what-the-hell-ever they're calling it these days, but, yeah.

Warning voices.

Niiiiiice little warning voices.

Not like anyone who wasn't him ever listened to them, not back then –

"No, Buck, seriously, don't jump off the – yeah, okay, that was just half the skin on your arm, or more like off your arm, wow, and we don't got any iodine, never mind."

"No, Ma, that giant dustpile in the corner you just swept up, if you put the extractor over it it's just gonna –" Oh well, it's only a week of not breathing so good, no big deal, and Ma's guilt as well, more of a big deal, but jeez.

He listened to them, though, the ones in his head that told him to wrap up warm, don't eat the weird new food, do _not_ take that dare about eating worms out of a bottle that used to have mescal in it, you know, those voices. 

Before the serum. Before Erskine. Before "Oh, man, look at how I can do THIS!"

Now he just tells them to shut up, just like everyone else told him to shut up, and it's pretty damn cool.

Thing is, now he's got a new voice, and it's not as sensible and it's not as pleasant, and it whines, and it's _Bucky's_ voice, which, hi all the irony in the world, nice to meet you in a war, where were you when I needed a sense of humour?

Jumping from one fire escape to another and skinning his arm, that's what his irony-loaded whiny so-called best friend was doing back then, so now that Steve doesn't _need_ any goddamn iodine and Bucky still kinda really _does_ , or maybe those M&B things, or just good old fashioned sulfate powder?

Steve gets the sensible voice from _other people_.

Steve is also kind of pissed off and sitting on top of the weapons depository right now, and there is no little voice in his head and there is no whining at him from Bucky, so life's seeming pretty good to him right this second.

Of course, it would be even better if he could be drinking hooch and knowing it might have some effect on him, but what the hell, he's making do.

He'd feel a lot less weird about the whole thing though, if it weren't for the fact that yeah, there were all the voices, once upon a time and when he was a different man (at least on the outside) and not all of them came from inside him, and the ones that weren't stressed about money or what they were going to do now, and they never said _Steve, I wish, oh baby, I wish...._ and they never sounded like they might cry at any second, and they were – 

no, c'mon, here, honestly, Rogers, you're supposed to be good at that, the honesty thing, it was never they, it was never even himself – 

it was always Bucky, it was always him, _he_ was the one who was just kind and accepting about it? On the outside, anyway, and half the time, hey, more honesty here, _most_ of the time, that was all Steve needed.

Just five minutes. Just five minutes, two minutes, a half-minute awkward countdown of a hug, anything, however short a time.

Just a little break in which he didn't to have to be comforting someone else for his own shortcomings.

The voices back then, they didn't all come from inside his head, man, not at all. They came from Bucky just as much as the whining comes now – and Steve gets it, you know? He gets where Bucky's coming from.

He gets what it's like, when you wrap yourself in caring about someone that much, loving someone that much, wanting to save them that much, and then – boom. 

Serum. Instant fix.

What's Bucky feel needed for, what's Bucky think Steve needs him for, any more?

And Steve's a symbol now, he's the Captain now, and he can't be seen to take Bucky to one side and say –

"Same things I always needed you for, man. It wasn't the breathing and it wasn't the fever and it was never how much food there was or wasn't or what none of us could get new and you wanted to get for me so badly. It was the fact you wanted them for me, gave me a little bit of hope that I could want too, that I was allowed to want things to get – to _be_ better than they were too, I didn't have to slide down into the bottom of the hill of resignation and that sticky, cloying, slump of mud you can't pick yourself out of when you end up down there, and hell, we've got all that stuff now, we can ask for any of that good stuff whenever we want, but I don't think I got you any more, and it's killing me, because that hope you kept right on giving me, that little thing that mattered more than any of the rest of it? I'm losing it. I'm losing it for the stupidest reason imaginable, just because you don't think I need it from you anymore."

And he wants to say –

"I do, though. Please, man. I need it now, more now when it seems like I got all I wanted, than I ever did back then."

He wants to say –

"If I have to lose you, or you me, and we know it can happen – don't let death be a relief. Let's always have kept the hope, so dying's irrelevant."

He's never going to say any of that.

Deep down, there's only two thing's Steve Rogers is scared of.

One's losing Bucky to an unmarked grave, and the other?

It's spilling out his soul and having it laughed at.

So he wears what they tell him and he goes where they tell him and he says what they tell him, and all the time, all the time, he holds on to hoping that Bucky still cares in the same way he did when they were mismatched kids; he holds on to hoping that he'll see that look reflected back at him one day when he least expects it, he holds on and he holds on, and the at the last, when it matters, he _can't_ hold on, and this is loss, right, this is what loss is, this is --

and then he sees it, and it's not loss at all, my God it's anything but loss, and he can see it, he can see it, and he sees it right down to the end of the endless fall, and he sees it through the storms of ice and wind and snow, and he sees it, and he sees it, and he knows he was right.

Death doesn't mean a goddamn thing, in the face of that kind of love.


End file.
